Today's Cartoon

Three sweaters on and I'm still feeling the cold. It's well below zero outside and a freezing fog has descended. Can't get my body going today. Even typing this feels hesitant and awkward.

Today's cartoon was another drawn using 'The Gag Machine' late last night. I'm trying to use it every day, to see if it genuinely produces good cartoon ideas. I usually have my best cartoon ideas in the early parts of the day. However, if I'm distracted or busy, I might not get around to sitting down and thinking of what I'll draw that night. If I leave it too late, I struggle to think of a gag, so having a software backup is helpful. Whether this cartoon works or not, I'm not sure. I quite like it. I wanted to draw a beggar as a skeleton because I thought it might say something about our relationship with beggars. You can read it in a number of ways. Foremost, it's saying that the most successful beggars are those that look the most pitiful. So, reductio ad absurdum: a dead beggar skeleton would probably reap in the money. The other way to read the cartoon is that people rarely look a beggar in the eye and, by throwing money in, they somehow nullify any kind of liberal anguish they might otherwise have. This guy has clearly been dead months but nobody notices.

I draw these while I'm relaxing watching TV, which is why I put in too much time and effort. Once I have the idea and the basic cartoon worked out, I enjoy the process of slowly refining the lines and then adding the shading. I could have worked on this for a couple of hours more and been as happy as the proverbial Larry. The irony is that the more I work on a cartoon, the less use it probably is.

Today I want to see if I can refine my application and improve its ability to produce cartoon ideas. I suspect there might be a better way of structuring my data which will produce better results. I need to test it on a small sample of data to see what happens.